Consumerist stole one of my Creative Commons licensed images (resolved)

Published on January 29, 2007 in Blog. 3 Comments

Update: I emailed the folks at Consumerist, and Ben promptly added a photo credit to the page. Thanks, guys!  :mrgreen:

Saw a story come across Consumerist today, about how long your Verizon Fios connectivity would last under battery power if your power goes out, and I saw an image that looked familiar:

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p align=”center”>verizonfiosbackup.jpg

“Hmm,” I say to myself. “That looks just like the one of the photos that I took of my Fios installation.” So I dove into my archives, and sure enough, it is:

They cropped it a little, but http://consumerist.com/assets/resources/2007/01/verizonfiosbackup.jpg is definitely the same image as http://farm1.static.flickr.com/40/87167480_7fa6199f41.jpg.

I originally posted the image under my default Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license, just like all of my other photos on Flickr, but I don’t see any attribution anywhere in the Consumerist post. And I don’t know if posting it on their site, which has ads, constitutes a violation of the “no commercial use” clause of the CC license.

I posted a comment on the story at Consumerist:

Hey! You guys stole this photo, which belongs to me: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshb/87167480/ You posted it without attribution (thus violating the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license it’s posted under). You guys now officially owe me one meeelion dollars. I take PayPal. :-) Or just add some attribution, to be compliant.

I’m ticked off that a site that’s supposed to be all about protecting consumers’ rights stole one of my photos so blatantly. Bad form, guys. :evil:

This one is easy to make right, and we’ll all be happy.

3 Responses to “Consumerist stole one of my Creative Commons licensed images (resolved)”

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  • Stephanie Booth
    February 1, 2007 at 4:33 am

    I also often wonder how far the non-commercial part stretches. When the site in question is a splog of some sort, or a blatant placeholder for advertising, I’d say the use is clearly commercial.

    However… I do sometimes (try reaching a page of my site through google, by clicking on a link) display ads on my site. Does that mean that I cannot display on my blog a photo which is NC?

    I haven’t figured this one out yet.

  • Robyn Tippins
    February 2, 2007 at 12:10 am

    So how’d it get resolved?

  • Josh Bancroft
    February 2, 2007 at 3:37 pm

    I emailed them at tips@, ben@, and marco@consumerist.com, bringing the issue to their attention, and stating that they either owed me one meelion dollars, or an attribution link. They opted for the latter. :-)

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